В пучине бренного мира. Японское искусство и его коллекционер Сергей Китаев

The century-long story of the Kitaev Collection is, to borrow Churchill’s words, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” According to the Pushkin curator, Voronova, there are about two thousand prints currently in the roster. What happened to the tens of thousands proudly mentioned by the original collector? Why does this catalogue, called in the Pushkin “raisonné,” contain only 1546 entries, including insignificant prints in horrible condition, while dozens, if not hundreds, of decent works are left out?[206] (Sometimes the left sheet of a complete diptych is omitted, even though the right sheet is in the catalogue.) I made a start to unravel these contradictions. The fate of the Kitaev Collection is typical of what happens to a noble private initiative in Russia – be it under a czarist, Soviet or post-Soviet regime. Behind these vicissitudes remains the compelling story of Sergei Kitaev and his enchantment with Japanese art.

An “Encyclopedia of All the Arts of Japan”

In the late nineteenth century, when the young Sergei Kitaev began to buy Japanese art during his stopovers in Japanese ports (1885–86 and 1893–96), the collecting of ukiyo-e prints in the West was enjoying exponential growth. In Russia, however, he was virtually the first swallow of spring. (Regrettably, this swallow did “not a summer make” of Japanese art in his country.)[207] Kitaev can be included in the brilliant cohort of Russian collectors of his generation: well-educated and well-heeled representatives of the merchant class, who were more aesthetically open and daring than the nobility and gentry-class collectors, who traditionally gravitated toward European classical art. Kitaev looks like a representative man of his time and means, somewhat effete and in the sway of fashionable things Japanese. He was artistically gifted himself, being an amateur watercolor artist and a man with a refined and fragile nature. Not without reason, Kitaev chose as his “favorite” and “soul-mate” Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), the last important and innovative ukiyo-e master, who marked the end of the two-centuries-old cultural tradition[208]. An excessively overwrought – to the extent of the macabre and pathological – decadent who suffered from nervous breakdowns, Yoshitoshi died in his early fifties, as would Kitaev in his early sixties, after a series of ruinous outbreaks of psychic malaise.

Not much is known about Kitaev’s life: a dry list of the slowly changing ranks in his personnel file in the Navy archive; brief mentions of his collection in Russian and Japanese newspapers; a few short letters from Kitaev to various officials; and a letter of recollections by his fellow officer (and artist) Pavel Pavlinov (1881–1966), written forty years after their last meeting.

E-5

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

The Spirit of a Virtuous Woman Sitting under a Waterfall (Seppu no rei taki ni kakaru zu), from the series “New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts” (“Shinkei sanju-rokkaisen”). 1892. Ōban.

On the strip of paper attached at the bottom of the print, Kitaev wrote the version of the story known to him. (translated here from the Russian): “Her husband had been crippled by the enemy. In order to propitiate the gods who might heal him, she vowed to bathe one hundred days in a row in a sacred waterfall, but the enemy killed her. Her ghost informed the husband when it would be feasible to finish off the enemy, and justice was restored: the enemy perished”. Hatsuhana’s husband was crippled when he injured his knee while searching the country for the man who killed his father. Hatsuhana carried him to a sacred waterfall, under which she prayed until she died. Her husband recovered and killed the murderer. Hatsuhana’s ghost then appeared, rising from the waters.

Early Life and Naval Heritage